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I am happy for the guy born into wealth. Why wouldn't I be? Dam I wish it was me but alas it was not. I hope to leave some legacy for my children, don't you?

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about the simply upper middle class inheritance. I'm generally not happy about people born into wealth because I have observed 100 out of 100 of them have a gigantic sense of entitlement about it. As they said of George W Bush, he was born on third base but thought he hit a triple.

There is quite a difference between what I would leave my offspring and what, say, Paris Hilton is going to receive. I am a proponent of a return to a 95% inheritence tax on everything over about a million dollars. But that is not a specific policy, so lets not quibble over the details. Suffice it to say, I'd tax the hell out of large inheritance. As it is now, inheritance tax applies to almost no one but the very richest families and yet they keep trying to make it smaller and smaller. As if they think it will some day apply to them.

But why would I wish someones dad did not leave a compfortable life for his kids with his labor?

Fairness. Equal opportunity. To ensure we do not have a permanent aristocratic class that has the money to buy government, which we now have, in my opinion. We are living in a second [wiki]Gilded Age[/wiki].

I could turn the question around, why would you want people to have a pile of money they did nothing to earn?

That is irrelevant and not what I said. It is an ideal. If we want to be able to have upward mobility based on what we deserve, we need to have policy that encourages it. But we don't. Do you not want people to be rewarded based on merit?

As it should? Why should it? Why should a person receive vast sums of money they did not earn? Do you think it does those people any good to know from the moment they are aware that they will never have to work for anything?

Some people can not escape poverty, but most of them are stuck because of life choices made young and bad family/cultural priorities.

Also not true. Poverty has been created by "pro business" policies. It has as much to do with education, tax policy and trade policy. Don't forget labor laws and the general weakening of unions. If you adjusted for inflation, etc, the minimum wage in 1968 would be equivalent to about $21/hr.[1] People doing the same job today as they did in 1970 make about a third the pay.

For some reason I have seen a lot of fellow americans have an attitude that someone working in a warehouse or a gas station or the grocery deserves to be poor because they think those jobs are menial or not important. I disagree. We still need all those jobs. The only ones benefitting from such wage depression are the stock holders of those employers, who generally tend to be the rich.